A Matter of Scale

From the study of the physics I was conducting and
from various discoveries I had made in exploring my
internal experience, I realised that if we were truly to
look for a complete picture of the dynamics and
mechanics that produce both the material world and the
observer that experiences it, the model would have to
be based on an infinite relationship of scales.

I discovered within myself what seemed to be an
infinite division of the scales, beyond reconciliation
with the concept of a bubble Universe from which
everything started with a bang, without any clear
understanding of either what produced it or how the
material got there to bang in the first place.

I remember being very young, probably about seven,
when it was explained to me that the Universe was like a
big balloon expanding. My first question to myself was:
expanding in what? Surely, if the Universe were
expanding, it must be expanding inside another
Universe, larger than the one we are in. And then again,
if that one were expanding as well, surely it must be
expanding in a larger one, and so on. There was no easy
solution to the riddle. The only thing that made sense
was that the Universe was infinitely
large and infinitely small, that we
lived in a continuum of divisions, and
that our world was defined by the
mere fact that we observed the
Universe from a very specific scale.

For instance, if you were
experiencing the Universe from the
scale of an atom or even a subatomic
particle, your experience would be
widely different from the experience
you have of your Universe as a human
being. And if I were to grow you from
an atom to the size of a human, you
would most likely think that you
had changed Universes or even
changed dimensions (although
that would be partially true, as
you have literally changed in
dimension).

These thoughts had come to
me in various ways throughout
the years, but how could they be
appropriately expressed in
physics? Was there any physics
already written in our world that
indicated such a principle at
hand? Furthermore, did these
concepts agree with thousands and thousands of years
of advanced thinking in philosophy, mysticism and
religious belief?

The first clue had come in my teenage years, when I
initially realised that for almost 100 years a chasm had
existed in our physics between the mathematics and
models we use for large objects, which predict a
continuum that tends towards singularity and infinities
(Einstein's field equations), and the quantum world of
atomic and subatomic particles, which predicts linear
functions of bounded states, well defined and with finite
behaviours. Yet big things are made out of small things,
so how could the Universe use two completely different
sets of physics?

How could the Universe be both finite and infinite at
the same time? Truly, day-to-day experience seems to
point to the existence of well-defined finite boundaries.
After all, your body's dimensions are defined by what
appears to be a very specific scale. The same applies to
the chair you're sitting on, or the pole you're holding
onto while you're reading this article on the bus on your
way to work. But wouldn't an infinite Universe have no
definition, no distinct way of identifying a boundary to
define all other ones? All of this became the subject of
many years of contemplation, and the answer,
interestingly, came from an unexpected source.